If you’ve recently reinstalled or upgraded macOS you may have encountered an issue where the “trustd” process consumes lots of CPU resources, causing bad battery life and overheating on your Mac. It may be accompanied by the “nsurlsessiond” process, among others. So read on to find out what trustd does and how you can stop it hogging your Mac’s CPU resources.
What does “trustd” do?
The process manages certificates for HTTPS as well as Mail, the App Store and others. It also manages Keychains, which is where your Mac stores all kinds of passwords such as WiFi, iCloud, App passwords, user passwords etc. So it’s certainly not something you’d want to do away with, if that were even possible. However there’s no reason it should be hammering your Mac’s CPU, so we’ll need to fix it one way or another.
How can you confirm “trustd” is the cause of the high CPU use issue, and not another process?
As mentioned earlier, the “trustd” process may be accompanied by other processes such as “nsurlsessiond” and “syslogd”. So how can you confirm it’s trustd specifically causing the issue? Restarting your Mac will restart all processes, so that won’t narrow it down. The best way to confirm is to run the below command in the terminal, which manually kills off and restarts the trustd process:
sudo launchctl kickstart -k system/com.apple.trustd
If your Mac’s CPU usage drops right down after restarting trustd, then it’s definitely the cause of the issue. Read on to find out how to fix it.
How to fix the runaway “trustd” process
As the trustd process is related to the keychain, deleting the “system.keychain” file has been known to solve the issue for users. While the keychain will recreate itself, you will lose some saved credentials such as your WiFi passwords. Follow the steps below to delete the “system.keychain” file:
Browse to the “Keychains” folder
The “Keychains” folder is located in the “Library” folder, which is somewhat hidden. To access it press Command-Shift-G on your keyboard and enter “/Library” in the box that comes up:
From the Library folder, go to the Keychains folder.
Backup & delete the “system.keychain” file
In our testing deleting the “system.keychain” file didn’t cause any adverse affects, however it’s important to make a backup just in case. Simply copy system.keychain to another directory on your Mac then drag the original to the trash. You’ll most likely be prompted for your admin password to complete this.
Restart your Mac
Now that system.keychain is deleted, restart your Mac and the file will be re-generated. If any unexpected issues occur you can always delete the new keychain file and put the old one back.
What if deleting system.keychain doesn’t fix the issue?
If the issue is still occurring after deleting system.keychain, or if deleting it caused other issues, you will need to blow away macOS and reinstall it. Follow these instructions from Apple, and make sure you complete the option specified in the article to erase the disk first. In our testing installing macOS over the top of an existing installation did not resolve the issue, so you will need to wipe your Mac’s disk and start completely fresh.
Do you have another solution?
Did you try something else which fixed the runaway trustd issue? Then please share it in the comments section below to help out other users who are experiencing the issue!
Thanks for the tip – even with an SSD my restarts would take forever, but now it’s a matter of seconds and no fan kicking in anymore
Не помогло!
It helped to also delete System.keychain-orig
https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/trustd.html
“Addendum: Solution” part, bottom of sheet.
Unfortunately this didn’t fix the issue in my case.
Trustd keeps coming back at 100% eating my battery over night.
Doing a complete reinstall as an official solution from Apple sounds ridiculous.
If I wanted to reinstall in case of an issue I’d have bought a much cheaper windows laptop.
Apple needs to fix this asap.
The process trustd only starts using too much CPU when I plug in de power cord.
If I restart de machine and use it only on battery, the process is there (4 instances) but with no high CPU usage.
Anyone with the same issue?
Let it “process” for 2-3 hours with the power cord connected.
So far so good (since 1 day ago).
yes the same
I have the same thing. Deleting the System.Keychain didn’t help, but I found out, that it is also depending on the Internet Connection. Without Internet but plugged in power cord the trustd process keep down.
Deleting the keychain file and restart did not fix issue for me either. However, I had a pending OS X update (10.15.7). After installing the update the issue seems to have gone away.
Well crud, once I launched Xcode and a iPhone simulator the issue came back 🙁
Well, after about another hour of 100% CPU it finally stopped so maybe that did “fix” it…we’ll see if it happens again now I guess
Didn’t work for me. Deleted system keychain but didn’t need to re-enter wifi password as if I never deleted it at all. Any ideas why? I don’t want to reinstall OS.
wow it worked like charm… I too was facing the heating issue… it resolved… thanks a lot.
This solution worked like a charm! Thanks for posting it.
very good article, right to the point. The system.keychain trashing eliminated the problem right away.
My computer is back up to speed! I was getting so frustrated with it taking forever to load but now all is good. Thanks so much!
OMG thank you so much!!! I’ve been looking for a fix to this since the update and this has finally done it.
This man is a wizard! Do as he says!!
Thanks so much for the advice!!
It WORKED!!!!! deleted the file and then restarted. Computer running fast again.
Thank you so much – this worked! Have been having problems with high CPU usage by trustd and constant fan running/laptop overheating and this solved the problem.